Professor Catledge about Macedonians

[Ptolemy]

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Chapter 13 pg 203-204

Aristotle thus embodies the key political shift that took place during his lifetime in the balance of power within the old Greek world. The Peloponnesian War had been fought between the southern Greek powers of Athens and Sparta and their allies, with the northern Greeks very much on the periphery of things most of the time. But by 336, when Philip II was assassinated while celebrating the wedding of Alexander’s sister, Macedon had become the undisputed single great power of the Greek world. It was ultimately for his connections with Macedon-far too cozy in the eyes of Athenian patriots-that Aristotle was to suffer his premature death in 322.
In 367, however, when Aristotle made the journey south to sit at Plato’s feet, Philip not only had not yet come to the throne of Macedon but was actually being held hostage in Thebes, which was then, under Epaminondas, at the apex of its influence. The 360s are sometimes referred to as the “hegemony” or “ascendancy” of Thebes. But, as we have see, the Battle of Mantinea in 362 brought confusion and disturbance once more, and the divided Greek cities of central and southern mainland Greece were notoriously unable to unite sufficiently to resist the southwards expansion of Philip, which climaxed on the field of Chaeronea in Boeotia in 338. Thereafter, through what modern scholars call the League of Corinth, Philip in effect had a stranglehold on the Aegean Greek world and deprived the Greek cities in his power of their cherished freedom and autonony. Yet Aristotle never gave up his belief that the real essence, the true nature, of Greek politics lay in the individual city-state, the polis.
About three years after Chaeronea, Aristotle returned to Athens following a long sojourn away in northern Greece (in Macedonia, as just mentioned), the east Aegean (where he met his future pupil and successor Theophrastus on Sappho’s island of Lesbos), and Asia Minor (where he married the ward of an intellectually-minded dynast called Hermeias). He shortly thereafter founded the Lyceum and quickly proved himself a master of research in more than one sense: both in carrying out researches himself into just about every field of scholarship then recognized, and in organizing and supervising the researches of his pupils, some of the collaborative. This all has a remarkably contemporary feel. So too does the way he and his pupils drew up the ancient equivalent of databases (entirely by hand of course, and preserved on expensive papyrus). He created the first ever research library, which after his death passed eventually to the Ptolemies of Egypt and became the founding core of the great Library of Alexandria.

Chapter 14, page 213

Still, Olympias, a Greek from Epirus married to a king of Macedon, neither of them regions with powerful naval traditions in her day, was hardly the most obvious choice…There is, nevertheless, something rather appealing about the thought of a revived Olympias again riding, or rather cutting through, the ocean wave. The original was certainly one of the most go-getting and colorful of all ancient Greeks who left their indelible impress on the historical record…<br>

Chapter 14, page 216

Olympias, it seems, though Greek by birth, was well ahead of the game and fully exploited these alien dynamics to her best advantage. It helped, of course, that she was the daughter of a hereditary ruler, Neoptolemus, who was king of the Molossian people. These Greeks lived in Epirus in the northwest at the very edge of the pale of Greek civilization. Like other frontier Greeks-in Cyprus and Sicily, for instance-the city-state from had not sunk roots as deep as those of the old Greek heartland, and political conditions demanded the existence of a strong, centralized military executive that was most easily satisfied by having a hereditary monarchy.

Chapter15, page 228

Alexander was not the first Greek to receive divine honors in his lifetime, but the precedents were very few and of course, inevitably, inexact.

Chpater 15, Page 229

But his legacy of Hellenism, so far from perishing in 323, went on to flourish in all sorts of unexpected corners and in all sorts of unpredictable ways. That the New Testament was written in Greek, for example, although it was written for Palestinian Jews whose first language was Aramaic, is just one example of this legacy of Alexander.”
Another is the Museum and Library at Alexandria, founded by Alexander’s boyhood friend Ptolemy, who had hijacked Alexander’s corpse as it was en route for burial in Macedon and had it entombed magnificently at Alexandria as the legitimating talisman of his rule. Through Alexandrian scholarship the literary heritage of old Greece was preserved and transmitted, first to the conquering Romans and then to their successors, the Byzantines, and ultimately, via the Renaissance of classical scholarship, to us.

The Greeks Crucible of Civilization 2000

[PhiliptheUniterchaeronea]

Paul Cartledge is a well respected professor at Cambridge University in England. Here is a link to just one site that mentions him:

http://www.hoplites.co.uk/html/cartledge.html

Paul Cartledge is Professor of Greek History,
Chairman of the Faculty of Classics, and a Fellow of Clare College,
at the University of Cambridge.

He took his undergraduate and doctoral degrees at the University
of Oxford. He is co-editor of the monograph series 'Key Themes in
Ancient History' (Cambridge University Press) and 'Classical Inter/Faces' (Duckworth) and is a member of the editorial boards of the journals
Dialogos (Hellenic Centre, King's College London), POLIS,
and History of Political Thought.

He is the author, co-author, editor or co-editor of 16 books.
His publications include most recently The Greeks: Crucible of
Civilization (BBC Worldwide, 2001) and Spartan Reflections (Duckworth/University of California Press, 2001).

He is currently preparing studies of Greek political thought from
Homer to Plutarch, and of ancient Greek social and economic history.








THE SPARTANS
PAUL CARTLEDGE
The Spartans accompanies the Channel 4 programme.

The book is based firmly on ancient sources, both written texts (many of which are quoted in new translations) and archaeological artefacts, and is interspersed with snapshot biographies of Spartan men and women.

The history of this extraordinary people, whose ideals have attracted so many societies over the centuries, is vividly and personally brought to life in this epic account of Sparta and the Spartans.





Professor Cartledge Honoured in Athens
Greek honours to UK academics

The President of Greece, Mr Constantinos Stephanopoulos, awarded yesterday the Golden Cross of Honour to three top academics from British universities for their outstanding research and work on Hellenistic studies.

Honoured in Athens were: Dr Paul Cartledge, professor of Classical Hellenism at Cambridge University, Dr Judith Herin, professor of Byzantine studies at King's College, London, and Dr Richard Clogg, professor of Modern Greek History at Oxford University, as well as a Hellinist.

As printed in Parikiaki (the leading newspaper of the Greek Community in Britain), 25th July 2002.



Recommended Reading

[Ptolemy]

Now lets see what Cartledge says about how Alexander the Great felt himself.

He Himself [Alexander], was in absolutely no doubt [about being a Greek]. In culture above all, following the lead given by his father, he professed himself a lover of Greek things and surrounded himself with Greek courtiers - from his chamberlain Eumenes to hs official historian Callisthenes, His admiral Nearchus (a companion of boyhood) and his official sculptor Lysippus. He proclaimed himself a new Achilles - and his most intimate companion, Hephaestion, his Patroclus. He advertised the Persian campaign as a (Pan)Hellenic crusade, being careful to return to Athens from the administrative capital Susa statues stolen by the Persians in 480. He also sent there three hundred suit of armour for dedication to Athena by 'Alexander son of Philip and the [other] Greeks'. He celebrated Greek-style games and festivals at regular intervals during the campaign, and he spread the worship of the Greeks' gods, not least through the foundation of a number of Greek cities at nodal points in the empire. There is even testimony, in Plutarch's biography, to his Greek bookiness:

When his campaigns had taken him deep into Asia, and he could lay his hands on no other books, he ordered Harpalus to have some sent to him. They comprised the [prose] histories ofPhilistus, many tragedies by Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides,and dithyrambic poems by Telestes and Philoxenus.

Paul Cartledge: Alexander the Great, The hunt for a new past

[Ptolemy]

About his so called 'divinity'...

Another of the major thems we shall be exploring with special care is Alexander's percpetion of himself and his desire for recognition by other, as more than merely mortal, as in some way superhuman or divine. He was not, quite, the first in the Greek world to become, literally a cult figure....

Paul Cartledge: Alexander the Great, The hunt for a new past P. 17

He was also receiving lifetime divine worship from Greeks in the Greek cities of Asiatic seaboard, filled as they were with gratitude for their liberation from Persian domination. Possibly too in mainland Greece - if, that is, we believe the very shaky evidence for a direct imperial orderi ssued in 324 by Alexander himself that he should be so worshipped

Paul Cartledge: Alexander the Great, The hunt for a new past P. 18

[akritas]

Paul Cartledge in Great Alexander, Chapter12

"While Alexander's posthumous presence is ubiquitous, there are 5 areas of particular influebnce & contention. The was a politico-ethnic issue in his own day as to whether or not counted, wholly or in part, as a 'Greek' under the act. This aspect of his legacy exploded again, very recently in the early 1990's with the disolution of the former Yugoslav establishment, on part of it's ruins, a new state: the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, but known unofficially (by it's government) as just Macedonia.
This name is shared with the province of Macedonia in today's contemporary Hellenic Republic, which was once part of ancient Macedon.
The new, putative Macedonians compounded thier heinous - in official & unofficial Greek eyes - offence by appropriating major symbols drawn from thier name sake.
For example, the iconic (originally Venetian or Turkish) White Tower of Thessaloniki, a city founded soon after Alexander's death, was pressed into service, as was the 16-pointed star that appears conspicuously on the gold-coffin found in the 'tomb of Philip' at Vergina."

[Mygdonia]

I am quite sure Carteledge also wrote about Basil II, but am not sure.

[Melbourne]

Looks like that if Alexander was not Greek, then he sure as hell was the biggest Grekomani of all time!!!

[PhiliptheUniterchaeronea]

Cartledge wrote a book about, and called, THE SPARTANS.